Textiles of the Banjara - Official Release

Neelavva, Banjara woman. Karnataka, November 2013.

This month is the official release for Textiles of the Banjara: Cloth and Culture of a Wandering Tribe. A book I co-authored with Charllotte Kwon.

Charllotte had been seeking embroiderers from this community since she first started visiting India. I joined her on her search and was able to apply my love of portraiture to the project. We photographed Neelavva in the fields where she and a small group of other women were working. It was the corn harvest. I carried a large piece of black cloth with me. Two assistants held the cloth behind her and I made the picture.

This photo, along with Banjara embroidery, will be included in an exhibition to take place at the Monte Clarke Gallery, September 22 - October 1, 2016.

Here is link to the Banjara promotional PDF.

Alex Kwon

Alex Kwon, restorationist. January 17, 2016.

It was dark and cold but the rain had stopped. Alex drove the 64 Continental past us to the rear of the lot. It seemed to take an hour to pass, such a long car. I tried for a long time to light it, to show it, and in the end I just gave up and let the car be what it wanted to be. So much blackness. Like a hole in the night.

--  :  --

I have started to post on instagram. I'm hopeful that, in the same way sound artists in the '80s made "radio art" as a way to reinterpret broadcast media, there is a way to leverage instagram as a creative medium.

Here are two links to this post in that medium.

Darkness of the Edge of Town

Darkness of the Edge of Town No. 2

Wilfred Stanzer

Wilfred Stanzer, author, film maker, explorer, May 17, 2014.

Some people seem to live more than one life. Wilfred Stanzer might have rested after making six documentary films for Austrian and German Television. He was travelling among the nomads of Afghanistan and east Persia, he admired and studied their carpets, but when the situation in Afghanistan became too difficult he knew he had to leave.

He began travelling in Morocco. He had already written KORDI — Lives, Rugs, Flatweaves of the Kurds of Khorasan and Morocco was new and strange territory. Wilfred Stanzer's Moroccan explorations would become the foundation for his next book, Berber published in 1991. 

I was able to travel with Wilfred for a few days in 2014, an opportunity I owe to the intersection of Maiwa's interest in natural dyes and Wilfred's interest in reviving traditional artisan work in a small village in the Anti Atlas mountains. Wilfred is a remarkable man, at ease barefoot on the Saharan dunes or trekking through the hail when our mountain road was washed out by flash floods. He demonstrated the kind of facility for memory a man develops when he is constantly among new languages, patterns and cultures. When Wilfred left our small group he said goodbye to each individual with a comment tailored to who that person was, or what they had experienced.

This portrait was taken on the edge of the Sahara.

A letter is like ...

A letter is like the first page of a book. It is a leaf without a history, nothing preceding — no ancestors or parents. A letter is an orphan who makes his way alone, puts on his shoes in a quiet hallway when the other children are gone; the sun through the windows picking out motes of dust in the air, as if they were the stars in the heavens and like the stars the beautiful transit of their orbits traces a geometry without purpose or conclusion; a cipher we can never understand. A letter lives alone in the heart, like a man in a tenement, waiting for the right day to go out into the world. A letter is a solitary that dreams of the society of others, that keeps an ember of longing alive, that believes in a purpose. A letter is like the first page of a blank book and it carries with it the essence of promise. 

Yukiko Onley

Yukiko Onley, photographer March 18, 2014

Its a daunting task photographing another photographer. I guess the reasons are pretty obvious.

Yukiko Onley and I did some sessions in the Spring of 2014. She was the perfect model with grace and poise and an intuitive sense of what a photographer might be looking for. In the end this was my favourite shot from the session. In my mind it harkens back to Avadon's work with Audrey Hepburn — the black shapes of the figure, the grey backdrop.

This was part of a photographic exchange. I met Yukiko at my exhibition at the Ferry Building Gallery in 2014. She asked me if I would be the subject of a portrait shoot and, as turnabout is fair play, I asked the same.

Yukiko is well known in the Vancouver photographic community for her black and white portrature of such figures as Arthur Erickson, her photography of the Kokoro Dance Theatre and her long artistic relationship/marriage to painter Tony Onley. Her studio/gallery VISUAL SPACE which she shares with Peter Eastwood and Noriko Tidball moved to Dunbar St. in December 2014.

We did this shoot in Yukiko's studio when it was still located a few blocks off Main street.

Kathy Para

Kathy Para, writer, June 29, 2013

By the summer of 2013 I had been working on the portrait project for three full years. I was preparing for my third exhibition and was optimistically working with a printer on a hardcover book. People began to contact me about the possibility of a portrait. One such person was Kathy Para. Her manuscript Lucky (a novel about a photojournalist in Afghanistan) was generating a lot of interest. It was due to be released by Mother Tongue Publishing in the fall and Kathy needed an author photo.

At a certain point Kathy put her hands together in a most unusual way. That was it. I could have used just her hands as a portrait - they seemed to say so much. A book publisher needs something a little less abstract, however, and so the photo below was selected.

Esme

Esmé, graduate, June 25, 2013.

The summer seemed to last forever.

But as all days do, this day slowly slips into the past, like a coastline as the boat pulls away from the shore. First the rocks, covered briefly by shallow water, where the measurements are all human: the water is ankle deep, now up to my waist, now over my head, now it is the distance I can swim out to, and now we are beyond that distance also; drifting; the waves are no more than a line where the land and the water meet. Now the deep greens and blues of the coastline are signatures, signing the landscape. Now we are far away. Now we are years away.